ANIM8OR
TUTORIAL: HOW TO MAKE A ROCKET. LESSON 2
By José
Pablo Luna Sánchez. 2006.
In this tutorial we will cover how to make a rocket using lathe, mirroring and we will learn the basics about texturing with UV mapper.
You need:
If you are not familiar with UV mapping, or if you have problems when drawing splines, you may like to read this:
Let's begin
LOADING THE BLUEPRINTS
FITTING VIEW TO OBJECT
MOVING OBJECT
ZOOMING IN A CERTAIN AREA
DRAWING THE MAIN BODY
MOVING OBJECT TO TEMPORARY STORAGE
Moving objects to temporary
storage is required sometimes so the area where we are working doesn't become
cluttered with objects.
As the objects are moved to such storage they preserve their coordinates and
everything.
But they are in a place where you won't make your work difficult.
DRAWING THE MAIN ENGINE EXHAUST
MOVING TO TEMPORARY STORAGE
DRAWING THE BOOSTER
ADDING TEXTURES TO AN OBJECT
In the next steps we will
need to add textures.
To do that we need UV coordinates which makes the texture to be attached to
the mesh in a certain way (it tells the program how the texture should be wrapped
around the mesh), and also we need the texture itself, which is assigned to
a certain material.
Materials can be assigned to a mesh using Anim8or, but UV coordinates need some
special process using another software.
UV coordinates are
assigned to a mesh using a software called UV Mapper Classic.
UV Mapper Classic uses meshes saved in OBJ format, so we need
to export out object as an OBJ file, add the textures, and then import it back
into Anim8or.
Once we have it, we need
to create a material and assign a texture to it.
And then we need to assign the material to our mesh.
Sounds complex?
If you look at the diagram you will understand what we need to do.
If you don´t have a textured mesh at the end, it means that:
This was the general idea
of what we are going to describe as follows.
Now let's go step by step.
CONVERTING OBJECTS TO OBJ
UV mapper works with OBJ
files.
Since it will merge all objects in the file when you save in UV mapper, then
we must save object by object separately or we won't be able to handle them
separately.
ADDING UV COORDINATES (USING CYLINDRICAL TEXTURING)
We will need to repeat the
following procedure with every OBJ file we just saved.
We intend to wrap the mesh as if we were wrapping a cylinder.
The current texturing
is not of use to us, given the the texture we just have.
This is how the texture looks
and this is how the mesh would look with our current UV texturing provided by Anim8or...
This is not good... What do we do?
We will learn how to use UV mapper to texture our mesh.
Fortunately we have a texture that already included those 2 objects, instead of only one.
Unfortunately, the mesh is not yet textured right now, only the UV coordinates for the texture had been added to those objects.
Good texturing is what brings
life to a mesh.
As you go on, you will discover that.
ADDING TEXTURES IN ANIM8OR
As we saw before, we added
the coordinates of the texture to all vertices of our objects.
But we need to assign them a texture.
It should look like this
It should look like this
VERIFYING HOW TEXTURING LOOKS
As you may notice, the booster needs some rotation to make it look good, for text on the texture is a bit off the center.
ROTATION USING PIVOTS
When you do any operation
involving resizing or rotating, it is done around a point called "pivot".
You may notice that we need to rotate this booster without changing its position.
So we need to see if the pivot is aligned with the centerline of the booster.
MIRRORING AND ROTATING THE BOOSTER
We need to add 4 boosters.
First we need to add a new booster.
Now we have this
![]()
Now we need to select and mirror each booster individually.
This our rocket.
Do you like it?